W2ui: New open source JavaScript UI library: Stakes and Opportunities around anothers JavaScript UI library.
W2ui is the new open source JavaScript UI library and is very nimble, about 37kb which means that the load and execution times will be very quickly.
In fact this JavaScript UI
library is a complete set of UI widgets for data-driven web applications. Therefore
it
includes: layout; grid; toolbar; sidebar; tabs; popup; form; fields and utilities. It aims also to be 12 times smaller than Ext JS and 6 times smaller
than Kendo
UI.
All major browsers are
supported: Chrome, FireFox, IE9+, Safari, and Opera. But the Chrome experience could
be exceptional.
Let’s read a comment from the
author:
‘’I am also releasing complete
documentation on each widget. The documentation proved to be a much harder task
than I originally anticipated, but the exercise has proven to be extremely
helpful. I noticed that writing documentation helped me critically analyze my
approaches and trigged many re-writes, clean ups, and re-thinking.
"It comes with no
warranties of any kind. Use it at your own risk." The code is licensed
under MIT licence. ‘’
Now here is his opinion about others JavaScript UI library:
jQuery UI
Though jQuery is by far the
most popular general purpose JavaScript library, jQuery UI leaves much to be
desired. Apart from the date picker and autocomplete, many of its widgets are
useless (IMHO). And some important widgets are not there (Grid and Tree). I
have been watching jQuery UI for a long time and there is little movement in
its community. One might argue that the lack of jQuery UI widgets is filled by
the abundance of jQuery plugins. Theoretically you can build a killer
"Frankenstein" framework that will fulfill all your needs. I personally
do not like zombies, do you?
ExtJS
I have been watching ExtJS and
its community for a number of years and have nothing to say about the quality
of the product. Everyone who worked with it gives positive feedback and high
quality remarks. However, there are few things that I want to say about ExtJS.
(1) It is not free. (2) It is huge: 454 Kb on minified and gzipped JavaScript
(compare to 37 Kb of w2ui). You might argue that in the age of fast internet
connections the size does not matter. Connection does not matter, but the run
time JavaScript does. (3) And it looks dated. Its look and feel from the day
and age of Windows XP, whereas the web moved forward and many controls that
were good 10 years ago are now obsolete. Plus, there is this thing called HTML5
and CSS3 that is hardly used in ExtJS. It is still my first choice, when I need
to write something for IE6 :).
Kendo UI
This is a newer, fresher
library and overall I like it. It looks and feels modern. It is clear that
those guys use HTML5 and CSS3. But there is this annoying problem of licensing
and GPL that stops me (and many others) from truly taking advantage of the
library. Besides, it is kind of big: 225 Kb of minified and gripped JavaScript.
Dojo, Prototype
and Others
There are so many other libraries and frameworks that historically played a
huge role. However, with jQuery spreading like a wild fire and becoming a
library of choice for so many teams, it has become apparent that if the
framework is not based on jQuery it is hard for it to get big adoption.
Originally, I have started writing w2ui as a standalone library, but when I
came across jQuery there was love from the first line of code. Few years later
w2ui is rewritten with jQuery in mind.
